Alan Edwards was 18 when he first experienced Keith Moon. The teenager was manning the phones at a small London PR firm while his boss Keith Altham was over the road, lunching on his customary cheese roll and half a pint of mild, when the whirlwind that was The Who’s drummer blew in.

We’re talking some time around 1973, Quadrophonia time, the year when Keith Moon passed out on stage.

“There was a knock at the door and in he walks,” Edwards remembers. “He’s got a monocle and a top hat and cane and he goes ‘hello my boy, can you tell me where Keith is?’."

"I told him, and he wandered over to his desk, flipped it up in the air, sending papers and coffee mugs flying, causing absolute chaos. He walked back and tapped my desk with the cane and said, ‘tell Keith I called won’t you?’. A few minutes later my boss walks back in, look around, and shrugs: ‘Moon’s been in, has he?’”

Keith Moon of The Who outside BBC Broadcasting House, London, 11th July 1973.

Image: Michael Putland/Getty Images

It was a baptism of fire for the young publicist, but a fitting introduction to the world of music PR, that strange hinterland between the unpredictable realm of artistic endeavour and the journalistic mob.

Edwards would go on to act as a barrier between musicians and the press over the next few decades, working with everyone from The Rolling Stones and The Who to David Bowie, Michael Jackson, P Diddy and The Spice Girls, attempting to project a carefully crafted narrative to the public.

It’s a tough gig, at the mercy of the artist’s caprices and irrevocably changed in the age of social media, but it’s made for a fascinating career, much of which forms the backdrop to a recently-opened exhibition, Always Print The Myth: PR And The Modern Age, at the V&A in London.

Alan Edwards has amassed an enviable catalogue of anecdotes over the years in the music business.

Image: Outside

Edwards has stacked up stories over the years and plucks them from the rusty recesses of his memory in quick succession.

Many recollections are violent, like the time he inadvertently brought ten writers into the middle of an inter-band bust-up in The Who’s Wembley dressing room, or when his first high profile act The Stranglers stopped playing mid-gig so the drummer, Jet Black, could jump into the audience and join in a fight.

“It’s not quite like being on the road with One Direction,” he chuckles.

Others, like the tales of flying a bunch of journalists to New York to party with Debbie Harry and Blondie at CBGBs during the Warhol era, or touring Europe with P Diddy and Snoop Dogg and watching them dance on tables into the early hours as champagne cascaded, might make you question your career choices.

Debbie Harry of Blondie.

Image: Outside

Edwards’ own career took off in the 1970s among the dying embers of Fleet Street, when it was still home to many of the country’s main publications. Fresh from short-lived careers in advertising and music journalism he was marched up and down that “Dickensian place” by his boss, and remembers a media era that sounds a lifetime away when viewed through the lense of 2015.

“There really were people running around the newsroom with visors and sleeves rolled up, shouting ‘hold the front page’,” he says.

Before long he was fully ensconced in the punk scene, “genuinely thinking the revolution was about to happen and anarchy would be with us in five minutes,” and hanging out at the legendary Roebuck pub on the King's Road, the scene’s epicentre.

For a wage of around £25 a week in the mid-1970s he was pitching the likes of The Stranglers, The Buzzcocks and The Damned to an influential music press, which usually meant schlepping across London to deliver homemade, photocopied press releases. He eventually went out on his own in 1977, creating the first in a series of PR companies.

Alan Edwards at the music PR front line.

Image: Outside

One year The Clash played his office Christmas party above a disused fruit market, although he struggles to completely remember that one.

“There was no heating, the windows were broken,” he recalls. “Chrissie Hynde was there cadging cigarettes, I’m sure there was a Pistol or two there. There was no social media, no photographs, no police around. No-one thought ‘oh my God, this is something we’ll talk about forever,’ because they were just a new band.”

Before long Edwards was looking after the big guns: The Who (“tough kids from Shepherd's Bush, who did attract a lot of trouble”); Marc Bolan (“a proper star, 24 hours a day, who probably went to bed in the make-up and got up in the glitter heels”); and The Rolling Stones, who taught him how demanding music PR could be.

Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones at the press conference at the La Beat Route Club in London's Soho district, England on April 28, 1982

Image: Bob Dear/Associated Press

“They were very aware of the media,” Edwards recalls. “Mick especially was completely aware of it and focussed. During their 1982 tour he wanted to know who was coming to review the gig, have they got access, do they need a few quotes. He was capable of asking literally as they came off stage ‘what did they think?’.”

The critics’ view from the crowd was thus transmitted directly to the stars and could even influence the show. “I think they definitely would pay heed to it and maybe change things around.”

Stones' drummer Charlie Watts, on the other hand, was less interested in the press. “In the nine years I worked with him I only persuaded him to do one interview – with the Daily Telegraph about the English cricket team’s chances.”

Nevertheless, the evening’s reviews had to be delivered to each band member’s hotel room door, “7 o’clock in the morning when they woke up,” which meant a frantic early scramble for newsprint, “physically running round the hotel trying to get a bad translation of a Frankfurt newspaper.”

Mick Jagger looks toward Keith Richards and Ron Wood (left to right) as they perform on stage during a Rolling Stones concert.

Image: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis

The 1980s brought with them stadium rock and seismic shifts in the music industry. “Suddenly record companies were becoming big and powerful, corporate places,” Edwards recalls.

His roster grew, adding among others Big Country, The Cult and David Bowie, whose relationship with Edwards has lasted over thirty years. “I was hired in ’81, on the road by ’82, and am still in the job,” he says.

As you might expect with an artist that’s still a client, the Bowie stories are kept to a minimum, supplanted by effusive praise. “He’s one of the creative geniuses, icons, of the latter half of the last century - very modest, charming, and extremely intelligent,” Edwards insists. Anyone would think he does his PR.

While “Under Pressure” was ricocheting off club walls across Europe and Bowie was pairing up with Nile Rodgers for his post-disco classic Let’s Dance, the first mega-tours were criss-crossing the globe. Edwards was witnessing Bowie play to huge numbers, Bon Jovi strut their bouffant-haired stuff in Spain, and realising the effect a tour with hundreds of people in tow could have on the local economies of the world.

Live Aid was held in 1985 and broadcast to nearly 2 billion people globally.

Image: Outside

As the '90s rolled round he was enlisted to do Prince's press, but the purple one tested his suitability in the most bizarre way. He was flown to Minneapolis, led into a glass-walled office, played the Diamonds and Pearls album with “the distinct feeling someone was watching me,” and then taken straight back to the airport. The driver asked him what he thought before dropping him off for his flight, and then three days later he was told he had the gig.

One of the provisos of doing Prince’s press was that there was a phone in the office just for Prince that went straight through to Edwards. “If it rung, it was Prince,” he remembers. “It’s not an ego thing, he’s just very shy.”

Prince's "Diamonds And Pearls" was released in 1991 and the first to feature the New Power Generation credited.

Paul McCartney and Paul Simon were later added to the roster while Naomi Campbell, Jamie Oliver, and David and Victoria Beckham represented moves into new areas during the rest of the decade. In 1995 he launched the Outside Organisation, the PR firm he runs to this day.

However, there were two press conferences in particular that hammered home the global impact music publicity could have.

The first: when Geri left The Spice Girls in 1998. “It was a seismic event,” Edwards recalls. “It was one of the biggest news events around the world. The Spice Girls had sold nearly 50 million albums and there was no one in the world that wasn’t following them. We were running around, cobbling a statement together on bits of paper before going out in front of hundreds of media. I still get asked about it every week to this day.”

The other media maelstrom that gathered around Edwards came over a decade later. He’d first met Michael Jackson over sushi at London’s Nobu, and discovered a star that was “much more normal than you’d imagine.”

Late one night in June 2009 he received a call from showbiz editor Gordon Smart. “I heard a rumour that Jacko’s died.”

The rest of the night the phone didn’t stop ringing, with Edwards and his team fielding calls from Brazil to Japan while Jackson’s management team sent minute-by-minute updates from the hospital. “It was very sad, very unexpected,” he says.

Michael Jackson was scheduled to perform at a series of concerts in London in 2009 before he passed away.

Image: Joel Ryan/Associated Press

Music publicity has evolved dramatically since Keith Moon flung that table upside down. Gone are the days when music magazines would shift hundreds of thousands of copies and insights into a star’s life and mind came down to a few columns of inky print.

While record labels take an increasingly buttoned up approach, attempting to control access to talent in a way that would have been unthinkable in the ‘70s, those same artists are spilling all on social media, and building their own profiles online rapidly enough to render the role of traditional media almost redundant, especially when many acts have a larger online audience than most outlets.

As a comparison, the four remaining members of One Direction have around 80 million followers on Twitter cumulatively, and 23 million as a band, compared to, say, NME's 755,000.

In the middle of all this change stands the PR person, “conducting an orchestra” as Edwards sees it, “with the left hand keeping an eye on Twitter and Instagram while the other is on the Times or the Mirror, not forgetting how powerful TV is.”

The speed at which information travels has also had a huge impact. When he started out he was essentially tying a message to a pigeon’s leg, but now things go global in seconds. “The necessity of having a great, original idea, something that either catches people or doesn’t, hasn’t changed since I started in the 1800s,” he jokes exaggerating how long he's been in the industry.

One career that’s slipped into the cracks caused by this tectonic shift is that of the celebrity journalist, those Lester Bangs characters whose typewriters were as mighty as the microphone and who commanded – or at least demanded - the rock star treatment themselves.

“It was craziness,” Edwards recalls. “People got lost at service stations, forgotten at the wrong town. They woke up and they were in the wrong country.”

“I sent NME journalist Nick Kent on the road with the Stones. Three weeks later, I got a call asking where he was. He was still with the band. He’s probably still there now.”

Edwards has plastered the V&A in London with “scribbles and hieroglyphics” from his star-studded diary as part of a new exhibition, Always Print The Myth: PR And The Modern Age, which runs until May 9. Featuring press cuttings and photos from his campaigns as well as a range of speakers including Lord Tim Bell, U.S. PR man Ken Sunshine, and other editors and publicists, it aims to reflect on the evolving role of PR and the way it shapes the news.

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